Behaviors Indicative of Attachment with Pets Scale: An adaptation of the attachment during stress scale for companion animals

This article introduces a Spanish-language assessment tool for the evaluation of behaviors that are indicative of attachment to aid research into human-animal interaction. The psychometric properties of the adapted scale to simultaneously quantify the attachment are presented. A confirmatory factor analysis and a convergent analysis with the Mexican version of the Lexington Attachment to Pets Scale were performed using a sample of 397 human-animal dyads (21.4% cats and 78.6% dogs). A second study with an international sample (n = 107; 32.7% cats and 67.3% dogs) was performed to evaluate the English-language version of the scale. The findings provided evidence for the scale's and subscales' reliability and validity, with better values in the subscale associated with the human's behavior. The differences between human-human interaction and human-animal interaction in a modified version of the Ainsworth's Strange Situation Test are presented. Implications for future research using this model, in which the reciprocal behavioral process within dyads (human-domestic animal) may be assessed, are discussed.